My Experience with E-Payment in Sudan: Challenges and Opportunities I am a cofounder and CTO of a fintech startup company operating in Sudan. Our company aims to provide innovative and convenient solutions for e-payment using cards and POS devices. We believe that we have the right product and the right product-market-fit and we have a solid niche to operate on. However, we also face many challenges and obstacles in our journey to grow and scale our business in the Sudanese market....

Sometimes i legit be wondering about life. What is life? What is the whole point? What is the point of living? This is not a question that i can answer, nor is it a warning sign about my mental situation. I’m good thank you. But, this mundane, routine thing is becoming extremely irritating. An important person to me used to say that they were a virtual person in the process to become an individual....

This is not me fishing for validation or sympthay. This is just me. I don’t really feel seen. Like honestly, I never felt as though someone actually love me. I always felt I had to put in more efforts and be the giver as my only source and contribution to sustain a relationship. And I was ok with that for the majority of my life. I honestly don’t have a dream you know or a goal or whatever, I always just optimize for helping and to some extent serving others....

In a retrospect i love life, i have so much love to give and so much stories to tell. i have so many roads i wanna tap into and so many feelings that i yet to experience. Whilst the situation might not really encourage the message this post is trying to relay – and it might as well seems so off to the point it is irrelevant, given the economical situation we are in at the moment....

I had a delightful conversation with a friend of mine about the state of open source in Sudan, we discussed many topics but the main question was: why open source is not prominent in Sudan? Software industry in Sudan is not that mature yet, most of what we work on are rather simple crud operations. I feel that we still didn’t reach that point where businesses have worked through complicated business requirements that they decided hey let’s abstract all of that onto packages and modules we could use by other teams in other projects....

Payment in Sudan is rather a very interesting challenge. But, my focus today is on this rather unique characteristic: trust. I will take Bok, the mobile wallet app for bank of khartoum. It is the largest app in Sudan, backed by the biggest bank in Sudan. It has around two million users, and it became synomyoum to payment in general. If it is a payment channel, then in most case it will be BoK....

Today is the first day i enjoyed a quiet night in ages. I went back home rather very early at 330 and took a lovely nap too. Chatted with my friends and roomates, and shitposted on facebook. Now, i’m embrassing the nothingness, it is raining and I enjoy the sound of rain in the background, though I also indeed enjoy playing in the rain. I don’t have electricity at the moment, but I don’t feel pissed for that too....

I notice this general feeling of discomfort amongst my colleagues and friends. Situation in Sudan is not the best, and the grass is always greener on the other side. There are extremely good reasons for that, this is not what this post is trying to address. I don’t think life is meant to be comfortable, nor easy. But we can have fun and work our asses while we are at it....

One of the most commonly used practice for developing software businesses is agile. At its core, agile is a process of iterating on a product. The industry has been heavily relying on agile for years it became the defacto way of building software. Even if a said organization didn’t adopt agile, they use some variant of it. What happen when agile fails us. I have long been keen to collect feedbacks about why tech startups have failed in Sudan....

Software takes time and it can be quite unpredictable. I built the first version of noebs, a PoC that basically does nothing but acting as a reverse proxy to ebs in less than a week. It took some years later to add some functionalities that we initially created issues for them in ~ 2019. That doesn’t mean we necessarily spent the 3 years just trying to fix that– simply we shifted our priorities to other issues, or topics....